OneMusic New Zealand’s Greer Davies on the business case for intentional music in retail.
I’ve seen how retailers obsess over lighting, layout and product placement. They commission brand guidelines, agonise over typography and A/B test email subject lines. Yet many of these same businesses leave music to the whims of whoever opens up in the morning.
At OneMusic, we speak to hundreds of businesses a week. Few have given music deliberate thought despite decades of evidence supporting its strategic treatment.
A recent survey of 1,250 shoppers across New Zealand and Australia, conducted for OneMusic, found that roughly 40% had walked out of a business because the music was, in their minds, wrong.
Barely any of those businesses will ever know why. Choosing silence is no refuge either – customers read it as cold, uncommitted or unfinished.
The invisible salesperson
Music is popularly described as a mood-setter, but I’d go further: in the right hands, it’s a behaviour modifier. Background music shapes the pace at which customers move, the time they believe they’ve spent and subconscious associations they form with your products. Around half of New Zealand and Australian shoppers have stayed longer in a business because the music felt right.
There are four musical levers every marketer can control:
- Tempo: Fast music raises arousal and drives turnover. Slow music extends dwell time and encourages exploration.
- Volume: New Zealand and Australian shoppers rated volume as the No 1 factor in their first impression, with Kiwis particularly sensitive to high volume.
- Genre: Genre builds unconscious associations that guide choice. In a classic experiment, French music drove French wine sales, while German music drove German wine sales.
- Congruence: Switching from random music to brand-matched music lifts sales by 37%. When music contradicts your brand, 40-44% of consumers say it hurts their view of it.
Sound as brand identity
Consider how seriously you take visual branding – logo, colour palette and typography express brand values. Why, then, does sonic identity get so little attention, despite evidence that it’s just as powerful?
Research from Leicester University found 96% of consumers are more likely to remember a brand paired with music that fits its identity, and nearly half are more inclined to buy from brands whose music they enjoy. Big brands know what’s at stake: Burberry employed a dedicated global director of music for seven years, while Starbucks curates music to make its cafés feel like a destination. Locally, our data shows Kiwis place a higher value on hearing local artists than Australians do.
What Gen Z hears
One finding in our study is a wake-up call: 70% of Gen Z in Aotearoa can immediately identify generic stock music or AI-generated playlists – and associate both with brands that are indifferent, inauthentic or cheap. For this cohort, music is a credibility signal, evidence of your taste, thoughtfulness and shared values. Generic loops show you don’t really care.
Treating music as a business variable
I often wonder why music is still treated as a background task when there’s so much research to support its influence. Part of the answer is that the cost of getting it wrong is invisible: when music drives a customer out, nothing in the data identifies the cause – it just looks like a quiet Tuesday.
You don’t need a massive budget to fix this. Get volume right first, match genre to the brand experience, use real music, deploy tempo deliberately, and licence properly – 95% of consumers in our survey viewed a displayed music licence as a mark of a trustworthy, professional business. Most businesses treat music as the last detail. I want you to remember that customers experience it as one of the first.
This story is from NZ Marketing magazine issue 88, Sept-Nov 2026. Why not subscribe? Get four issues a year for just $50 (including delivery) if you autorenew.
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